Chick Lit as Healing and Self-Help Manual?

Abstract

Chick lit—today’S bestselling romantic novels about stylish, career-driven, urban female protagonists in their twenties or thirties—addresses several issues of modern womanhood. The genre became popular in the late 1990s and is considered to be a subgenre of the romance novel, because the female protagonist’s professional career, family, and friends are just as important to her as her romantic relationships. Marian Keyes’s Watermelon (1995) features a protagonist who wrestles with how to be a mother in a modern world; Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) humorously describes a professional woman’s negative self-image and its consequences when it comes to career and romantic relationships; and Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City (1996) is famous for its protagonist Carrie, her girlfriends, and their passion for shopping, but it also deals with many women’s impossible dream about romantic love and well-being. In Swedish chick lit, by bestselling authors such as Kajsa Ingemarsson, Denise Rudberg, Elisabeth Andersson, and Martina Haag, the focus is even more on contemporary issues of womanhood and modern women’s juggling of full-time jobs and family life. While these narratives are products of a specific Swedish context—its social structure and gender ideology—they also criticize and reevaluate different aspects of the Nordic welfare model.KeywordsRomantic RelationshipFemale CharacterFeature ArticleRomantic LoveWoman WriterThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.